Suleika Jaouad

An Emmy Award-winning writer and activist describes the harrowing years she spent in early adulthood fighting leukemia and how she learned to live again while forging connections with other survivors of profound illness and suffering.

A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

Between Two Kingdoms

A memoir of Suleika’s life split into two parts. Part one, her diagnosis and battle with leukemia. Part two, a road trip around the country as she navigates life and who she is after cancer. 

It’s raw and introspective, beautiful and devastating. It underlines, highlights, circles in red the sentiment that ‘everyday is a gift’ in profoundly better words. Get your tissues ready. 

Kaitlyn Wendler

A memoir of Suleika’s life split into two parts. Part one, her diagnosis and battle with leukemia. Part two, a road trip around the country as she navigates life and who she is after cancer. 

It’s raw and introspective, beautiful and devastating. It underlines, highlights, circles in red the sentiment that ‘everyday is a gift’ in profoundly better words. Get your tissues ready. 

"If I believed in the efficacy of prayer, you would be in mine, he wrote. Not being a believer, I nonetheless want you to know miracles do abound in this life, that the human body is capable of coping with things that seem insuperable"

"After you've had the ceiling cave in on you, you don't assume structural stability. You must learn to live on fault lines."

"The power of story is to heal and to sustain, she wrote. And if we are brave enough to tell our own story, we realize we're not alone, again and again."

I wish I read this at the start of my 20s - to appreciate it and to enjoy its mysteries. 

Ali Angco

Lisa Lindquist 

Madhuri Gubbala

I agree with Jhauolo's review of this book.

Isabelle Dion

Just read (or listen) to this one! Incredible story that is made even more impactful by the author's beautiful writing style.

Sophie Zuckman

Kate LeBlanc

Francine Corry

Alex Stelzhammer

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Rumpus • “I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New York Times Book Review “Beautifully crafted . . . affecting . . . a transformative read . . . Jaouad’s insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us.”—The Washington Post In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times. When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live. How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

Kaitland Cracchiola 

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission and, ultimately, a road trip of healing and self-discovery. “A work of breathtaking creativity.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love “Elegant and heartbreaking.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies “Mended parts I thought were forever disintegrated.”—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy “A propulsive, soulful story of mourning and gratitude.”—Tara Westover, author of Educated In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times. When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live. How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

Between Two Kingdoms A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

Reviews